Robert Garner, left, with Chuck Morris, president of AEG Rocky Mountain, at an event in June, 2012.

Word of theater producer Robert Garner’s death Thursday got eclipsed by the immeasurably sad news of the shootings at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora. Garner, 80, died at his home after a brief illness.

But our silence has come to an end. Here’s a peek at Joanne Davidson’s obit for the man who helped make Denver a stop — and better, a starting point — for national tours of Broadway shows:

“(Garner’s) showbiz career was launched in 1961 when he served as local producer for a one-week run of the musical “Fiorello!” …As he told former Denver Post columnist Bill Husted in 2011, “I thought: ‘This isn’t a bad gig,’ and I never looked back.”

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.